Читать книгу Startup CXO - Matt Blumberg - Страница 33

In the beginning, when sales first start happening, the key as a CFO is really just to be close to sales data and processes, and to help ensure that the “interest to order” process is clean and understood. This is also a good time to build a close relationship with the Head of Sales so that when there are challenges to overcome in the future, there is trust on both sides. You want to be able to know that when there are questions that pit the sales teams vs. what is best for the company, that the Head of Sales is considering long‐term company issues like precedent setting and fair payments. And you want the Head of Sales to know that you are able to strategically understand the role that Sales and sales compensation structures have in effectively running a sales team.

One way to start building a relationship with Sales early is to help the sales team develop key performance indicators and put in motion some understanding around the cost to acquire a customer (CAC). Each channel will have extremely different costs to acquire customers and you'll want to understand all of the pieces to know strategically whether you should keep using that channel. At Return Path we generally used two channels, direct sales, or indirect sales, where a partner resold our products. In direct sales we sourced the lead and closed the sale with our internal sales team, while with a partner channel they sourced the lead from their client base and closed the deal, sometimes with our help. One of the things we found out after we dug into the data was that if we analyzed all of the costs that went into a sale, including the reseller revenue share, the assistance we had to provide, and the channel‐specific marketing costs, the cost to acquire a customer through a channel partner was much higher than through a direct sale. Beyond the higher costs, we also found out that customers coming through the channel partner had lower retention rates. So, higher costs and lower retention. It turned out that our reseller channel was delivering much less value than we thought. Early sales teams, sometimes rightly so, focus primarily on the top line. So, an effective way to be a partner is to help the team understand all of the economics of different go‐to‐market strategies so that better decisions can be made.

As the company scales, another area where Finance can be an effective partner is by developing the concepts of cohorts and segmentation. A cohort is a group of people that are similar in one dimension and you analyze that collection of people as one group. The most commonly used cohort is acquisition date, and it's helpful to understand how different cohorts behave under different circumstances. For a startup starting to scale, customer retention by cohort is an important analysis. It is a lagging indicator but measuring the change in retention rate by cohort can help you make better decisions on the product, service processes, and team structure.

Segmentation refers to creating groups by looking at a group of data broken out in a number of different ways, for example, looking at data by region. As you scale, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, and retention rates can all be very different by region. A company may need to invest well ahead of revenue in order to establish itself in a region so customer acquisition costs may be high, dragging down your overall company numbers. And in some of the regions, local language may be critical to client happiness, so if you are still ramping up that part of your service offering, it could also drag down overall retention rates.

The point is, Finance can partner with Sales and help them both think about concepts like cohort and segmentation, and also provide Sales with analysis and tools to understand the impact of the business on cohorts and segments.